The Reformed Church seems to give weight to the books of the Apocrypha -- is that correct?
No, absolutely not. That's a Roman Catholic thing.
Why did your church leave?
Because there is no way to stop individual churches (and whole classis) from not following the rules of the denomination.
On paper the RCA is very Biblically conservative and the vast majority of the people are as well. But we have a small
and vocal group of very liberal churches (mainly in NYC and the northeast) that have allowed things like gay marriage etc. Many in the denominational HQ are very liberal as well. When told it's against the rules they refuse to stop.
There is no way to make them stop or remove them from the denomination. They won't leave and in fact told some of our people they intend to change the overall denomination. We have spent the last 15 years trying to make changes but its been unsuccessful. So it's time to go when its still possible (not that its easy) to leave (some of those liberals want to make it hard to leave).
We will most likely join a new denomination that is forming that will probably consist of about 250 churches leaving the RCA and CRC. The CRC being the Christian Reformed Church, which is another very similar reformed denomination with similar issues.
So its basically the same battle most older "mainline" denominations are having. They got infiltrated by leftists starting in the 1960's.
In a lot of ways we didn't fit well anymore with the RCA. Most RCA's are single location churches with 150-200 members and Sunday attendance of about 350-400. My church has five locations, about 6,000 members and 10,000 attendance.
We were by far the largest church in the denomination. The former Crystal Cathedral had been the long time largest in the RCA during the 1970's until the 90's (and most well known due to its TV ministries) but the remaining members of that church have also left the RCA as well.
We really don't want to leave, but we are basically getting pushed out.
